St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, No. 06, April 1878: Scribner's IllustratedVarious
General
St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, No. 06, April 1878: Scribner's Illustrated
Various
Children's literature -- Periodicals; Children's periodicals, American
Of course, our boys nowadays would be puzzled to cut a willow whistle or
mend the baby's go-cart with such a knife as this; but still, it will not
do to despise stone cutlery. Remember the big canoe at the Centennial,
that took up so much room in the Government building. That boat, sixty
feet long, was made in quite recent times, and only stone knives and
hatchets were used in the process.
I found, too, in that afternoon walk, some curiously shaped splinters of
jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and
yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been
purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle
blade. When I got home, I read that perfect specimens, mine being
certainly pieces of the same form, had been found away off in Norway; and
Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they
are fish-hooks.
Instead of my broken ones, we have in the fourth illustration some
uninjured specimens of these fish-hooks from Norway. Two are made of
flint, the largest one being bone; and hooks of exactly the same patterns
really have been found within half a mile of the little valley I worked in
that afternoon.
The fish-hooks shown in our picture have been thought to be best adapted
for, and really used in, capturing cod-fish in salt water, and perch and
pike in inland lakes. The broken hooks I found were fully as large; and so
the little brook that now ripples down the valley, when a large stream,
must have had a good many big fishes in it, or the stone-age fishermen
would not have brought their fishing-hooks, and have lost them, along this
remnant of a larger stream.
But it must not be supposed that only children in this by-gone era, did
the fishing for their tribe. Just as the men captured the larger game, so
they took the bigger fishes; but it is scarcely probable that the boys who
waded the little brooks with bows and arrows would remain content with
that, and, long before they were men, doubtless they were adepts in
catching the more valuable fishes that abounded, in Indian times, in all
our rivers.
So, fishing, I think, was another way in which the stone-age children
played.
THE MAN WHO DIDN'T KNOW WHEN TO STOP.
BY M. M. D.
[Illustration]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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